Do Much More With Your Photos Using PhotoScape [Windows]

What can you do with your photo collections? The most common actions are saving them in your hard drive, sharing them with friends and family, or printing them in a picture book. For those who want to go a little bit further, you can geotag the photos, organize the photos by faces and places, and modify the picture quality a little bit.

It turns out that there are still many things that you can do with your photos and PhotoScape can help you with that. This is a Windows-only application that provides its users with many photo editing possibilities.

Standard Features & More

PhotoScape might not be as famous as Picasa, IrfanView, or iPhoto (Mac) but it has many unique features that even the giants don’t have.

The app’s first page shows random Flickr images on the left and also gives you access to all of its features; from the common ones like an image editor to the uncommon ones like an animated GIF maker.

These menus are also available through tabs on the upper left of the window.

The most basic feature is the image viewer. You can browse to the location of your image using the Windows Explorer-like left pane while having the image thumbnails on the right.

Next to the Viewer is the Editor tab. There are so many editing options available that discussing them one by one would require more room than this one article has. I suggest you explore the editing tools by yourself and experience a few nice surprises here and there.

One unique editing feature that I found and like is “Mosaic” under the “Tools” tab.

You can select an area within an image, adjust the smoothness of the mosaic effect that you want to apply, and you’ve got something like this.

Almost everything that you do to a single image within the Editor can also be applied to several images at once using the “Batch Editor“.

Drag and drop images to the Batch Editor pane and choose what kind of effects you want to apply to them, including adding a frame and resizing.

Other Unique Features

The “Page” tab gives you the ability to create a layout of images and save them as one ‘page’. The list of available layouts are on the right pane, along with other options like the size of the page, background color, choices of frames and the ability to make round corners.

Another picture combining tool is located inside the “Combine” tab. The difference between this feature and the “Page” feature is that this one has no pre-configured layouts, it retains the full image, and is slightly simpler than the other one.

I personally think that the Animated GIF is a unique feature that I don’t find in many image editors. The feature allows you to combine several images into one animated GIF image. You can adjust several things about the result; including the change time, canvas size, resize ratio, image alignment, etc.

You can combine several different images to create a slideshow, or you can use slightly different images to create a simple animation. Another animated GIF usage idea that crossed my mind is as an alternative to static post images in your blog.

Photoscape doesn’t forget one of the most common uses of digital images: printing. It makes the photo printing process quick and easy, starting from choosing the photo paper size, setting printing orientation, to the number of photos per page.

Then all of the images that you’ve chosen to be printed will be adjusted accordingly to your customized configuration. For example, a landscape-oriented image will be rotated to photo-oriented to fit the chosen paper. No more manual rotations needed.

This one feature is totally the opposite of Combine. If you have one large image that you want to split into smaller images, use the “Splitter” feature. You can choose to break the image into several parts equally (under “Col, Row” tab) or into a fixed width and height pixel size.

Another feature worth mentioning is “Color Picker“. This one will be useful if you need to do graphic designing and need to add text with matching color to a background image.

These features; along with “Raw Converter” and “Screen Capture“; make Photoscape one of the most powerful alternatives to free photo viewing/editing applications on Windows.

Have you tried Photoscape? What do you think about it? Or maybe you think something else is much better? Share your opinions using the comment below.

This review may contain affiliate links, which pays us a small compensation if you do decide to make a purchase based on our recommendation. Our judgement is in no way biased, and our recommendations are always based on the merits of the items.

This review may contain affiliate links, which pays us a small compensation if you do decide to make a purchase based on our recommendation. Our judgement is in no way biased, and our recommendations are always based on the merits of the items.